Wednesday, 22 February 2017

"Some Panels in this curtain system are slightly malformed. The problem is most likely ignorable. This problem usually occurs when a panel or parts of a panel have been divided so that they are very narrow..."

An "ignorable" warning I can't actually ignore?! Hmmm, I wrote a post about this a few months ago; Warning! Revit Wish Ahead! In the post, I listed a number of things I would like to see fixed with the warning dialog. Ignoring warnings was number 1 on that list!

Dear Autodesk,

Please attend to the warning dialog, this is NOT an ignorable development item.

Saturday, 11 February 2017

*This post is also in video format, scroll down to view. I see this question occasionally in forums, "How do I format the headers in a Revit schedule?" to which the reply is often along the lines of, "you can't".

Recently I was playing around with formatting schedules and discovered that you actually can have two different text styles between the headers and body text.

Above Image: Header turned on uses the same text style as the Body text

Definitions

Before we begin we must clarify the difference between Header & Header Text.

The header text, found in the Appearance tab of the schedule settings, we can control by simply setting the text style.

The header is what we can turn on in the Sorting/Grouping tab. It is this header that users often want to change because it is often used as a sub-header to help sort the body of data in the schedule. As you can see in the image above, there is no option to set this text style.

The problem is the header font style comes from the font style set for Body Text. Therefore it appears we can't have two separate text styles between the headers and body text.

Method

The idea is simple, in schedules you can override all text from the Appearance tab except headers. We have had this ability for a few versions now and we can use this valuable nugget of information to help us create the schedule appearance we want.

1. Since we can't override headers, we will set the text style of the headers we want through the appearance tab on the schedule settings. To do so, set the body text to what you want your header text to look like.

2. Now, in your schedule we need to override the body text. Select the columns and click Font from the contextual ribbon to override the whole schedule with what you would like your body text to be.

3. Finally, selecting only the header text cells, override the font formatting to what you would like for your header text, or you can simply hit Reset to take on the text style set in the schedule appearance tab.

All done, check your schedule on the sheet, you will notice all the format overriding has not effected the header style you set earlier in the appearance tab.

Completed sample sheet list with font style overrides

If you are still unsure, I have created a video to demonstrate the above procedure.

Yes, this is a workaround and it does mean that your body text styles won't be set in the appearance settings, so this may effect your view template standards if you use them for schedules. If you use the Blank Line option from the Sorting/Grouping tab, you will also notice the height of this space increases if your header style is larger.